


pretty things

by Ashling



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 15:37:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15844275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: on what's allowed, on what's not allowed, on love, on beauty, on whether or notdeservecomes into it, on fatherhood.





	pretty things

Of course, Arthur made fun of the bear with its satiny bright blue ribbon. Tommy rolled his eyes and exhaled smoke and let it happen, because Charlie was too young to know or care. 

Secretly, though, Tommy was glad that Grace bought the thing. He remembered being little. He remembered starving even when they had porridge. He had quicker eyes than any of the Shelbys, except maybe Ada, and a more restless heart, yes, even at that age, and he was fully aware that there were beauties and wonders in the world that were closed off to him entirely, not just stuffy old works of art, but common things, like a pretty vase he could bring his mum flowers in, or a toy for tiny Finn, or even something for himself. 

By the time he had the extra money, he’d been taught not to want those things, or at least to pretend not to care about whether or not something was pretty, until of course there was Greta. Then he was allowed to pick flowers, and he wanted to pick flowers but there wasn’t much selection among the weeds, and then he stole flowers and ran and hid and showed up breathless and dirty from his best (and stinkiest) hiding-place, the stalks of the flowers a little crushed in his hand but the petals still brilliantly yellow. She sat him down on her bed and waited until he’d caught his breath and then kissed him breathless all over again. 

He wiped his hand on his trousers before he put it on her waist, and she, as if to prove she didn’t care, swung a leg over him and pushed him back onto the mattress and if she didn’t care then he didn’t either and it was just like that, fast and eager and he thought, _oh, this must be it_ , but then later he soaked away all the dirt in her small copper tub and saw her doing something with the flowers. Curious, he rushed through washing his hair, which he had significantly more of back in those days, and then emerged from the bathroom in a towel. He asked her what it was and she presented him with one of two flower crows.

“Kneel,” she said, and he was half-laughing, this was ridiculous, but he did kneel and his bare knees touched the floor and she put one ring of flowers on his head like it was made of solid gold, and she smiled at him like he was beautiful and so was she and she wasn’t afraid of any of it, there was nothing to be afraid of, and he knew he had been wrong, earlier. _This was it._ He was in love.

Later, he would have money for the flowers properly, but by then there were bills stacking up on bills for the doctors and pills and everything else, and he took on the family business in earnest, in ways that could leave him feeling dirty long after any bath. He loved her but he could feel himself changing. He loved her but he didn’t want to bring his new self to her bedside, began going out of obligation and with a slow gut feeling of dread, and she could sense that. She could always read him. She told him to go and he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t go and there were no flowers involved. And then she went, and that ended the argument.

He went away too, this time to a much closer hell, properly ugly, ugly in the way that it should have been, poppy fields all ripped up, scraps of cloth and scraps of people left hanging from barbed wire like little flags. He leaned into it. He dug deeper. He carved entire little worlds in nothing but dirt and he thought that was safe, but he was wrong. Because he was about to die, and he didn’t want to die, and then Freddie saved him and there was underneath all of that dirt a face that, in no logical manner, was pretty, and not again. Not a fucking gain.

Yes again, it turned out, and worse, because while Tommy was smoking his way closer to death and using the winnings from card games to stack up a decent sort of _I’m sorry_ to Kitty for not attending the funeral and to Ada for taking all the brothers and leaving her behind, Freddie was busy kissing fucking everyone. Soldiers, nurses, and he never got caught, or rather always got caught, and nobody ever cared. 

“I’m going to die,” Freddie said once, grinning in a way that made Tommy hate him even more, “and I might as well get the fun out of it,” and then he didn’t die and he got even more fun out of it, and that made Tommy angrier than he could admit or articulate, because Freddie made it look so fucking easy. People bloomed under Freddie’s smiles and Tommy didn’t want that to happen to him. From where he was sitting it looked like violence. From where he was sitting it wasn’t easy, and how dare Freddie make it look easy?

Except when Freddie was kissing him it didn’t seem too difficult. At first. Halfway through Freddie pulled away and said, in a voice of genuine horror, _oh God, Ada,_ and there really was no comparable feeling to learning that the mark against him wasn’t that he was a man but rather that his sister was first choice. Except he wasn’t really learning that, was he? Freddie and Ada had been almost inevitable since childhood, whereas the only inevitable thing in Tommy’s life appeared to be chaos and entropy.

Or maybe that was just a comforting sort of lie he told himself when things like this happened to him. He could count on decay until he couldn’t; when he got home, there was the business all ready for him, and the house, and he found to his quiet delight that he could jump right back into the heart of it all and make it run, as easy as riding a horse. Then there was no time to think about Greta or Freddie or beauty or lack thereof or other people or whether or not he should be doing this, because there were guns. 

Guns were undeniably pretty. They shone in the light and they were powerful enough to make or break a rebellion. He freely admired those. Then there was Grace, who he also freely admired, who lived in a flat of all grey and wore clean but old clothes and only ever appeared in masses of drunks but somehow shone all the better for it. He would have broken down the door to the Victoria and Albert if he could put a picture frame around the way she sang to him. He would have done a lot of things for the way she made him feel, the way she was quiet and it quieted him, for the way he slept at her side and the way she matched his howlingly mad response to a fight with her own. She shot first but she drank tea but she was golden. So many things at the same time he could barely believe it. Too good to be true.

When she returned from America he had begun to understand. The work was anything but steady, but he had a plan. Soon after, he had her. That was enough. Soon enough they had so much power, he could indulge. He almost had to indulge, really; turns out men were allowed to be dandies if they were rich, ridiculous if they were rich, oil paintings of horses and tall arched ceilings if they were rich. He had learned from May the basics of living in a palace. And the estate wasn’t a palace but it might as well have been. Grace matched him, furs around her neck, it wasn’t just that, it was her eye for detail and the way half the maids seemed to be in love with her, and it was the way she fixed the lapels of his jacket and bought their boy a little teddy bear with a bright blue ribbon on it.

Charlie dragged that bear around Birmingham, so the ends of the ribbon would get muddy and need replacing, and Grace kept an eye on him but kept smiling like she didn’t give a fuck, and Tommy started feeling some kind of hope that one day Charlie could have pretty things, could be with the people he found most beautiful, could put off learning what he was and wasn’t supposed to love until much later in life, and by then he’d be something that Tommy had never been and probably couldn’t understand. He’d be fully happy. Tommy didn’t know how to explain this exactly but Grace knew all the different pieces and she could put them together for herself when he kissed her and told her she was a good mother. 

 _Nearly had fucking everything?_ No, he had fucking everything. He kept moving, building, had to, that was necessary for his survival and Grace understood that, let him keep at different wars even though she’d found her own kind of peace long ago. 

He had everything, and then he didn’t. He could hear the small sounds she was making in her throat, but she couldn’t speak, so she tucked her head into the crook of his neck and died there. There were worse ways to die and he was glad he had been there, but these were mercies so small they made the head of a pin look like the size of Atlantic, and he found himself running away. Again. There were no wars handy and he knew better than to throw himself into a homemade little war because there were too many bystanders that, while not innocent, he didn’t want to become casualties. He told Johnny Dogs to get the wagon and he grabbed a few things from his room and in walked Charlie, dragging that bear, and Tommy ran away from that too. The nanny lingered in the corner of the room and avoided his eyes.

Tommy walked away, and then there was a _thunk_ and he ran back and it was nothing, it was alright, Charlie was safe, he’d just knocked over a bottle of perfume and it fell on his foot and he started crying. That wasn’t the last time Grace saved him, but it was the most important. Tommy could remember when his mum had died. In between her and Finn’s mum, Arthur Senior had walked away. Tommy liked to think of him as Arthur Senior because that felt properly businesslike. 

Anyways Grace might be dead but Charlie was not going to end up buying coconuts and top hats and being made a fool of, and Grace might be dead but she had still left him with one last mission. Unlike his father, Charlie was going to not drink until he was fifteen, and not see the inside of a hospital until he was in his thirties, and not get his heart broken for any reasons but the right ones. And if at the end of the day he figured out how his dad had managed to pay for and protect it all, then Tommy sincerely hoped that Charlie would hate him. If Tommy could turn all of his own self-hatred into a love for a son who was already almost entirely Tommy’s opposite, then that would be a neat trick, wouldn’t it? That would almost be like magic. Grace would likely have something to say about not hating himself but if she had wanted to have the last word on that matter, she should have let him die first.

Tommy scooped his son up in his arms and said, “We’re going on a trip, alright?”

Charlie considered this. “Bear?” he said. But not the way Tommy would have said it, at that age. Charlie said it like he expected to get what he wanted.

“Yeah, of course.”


End file.
